Empress Josephine eBook

Napoleon remained silent a moment at this news:
a shadow passed over his countenance; then his brow
brightened again, and he exclaimed: “Well,
I would sooner see it there, than in the dust of the
streets!”

CHAPTER XLI.

Daysofhappiness.

The prophecy of the old woman in Martinique had now
been fulfilled: Josephine was more than a queen,
she was an empress! She stood on life’s
summit, and a world lay at her feet. Before the
husband who stood at her side, the princes and the
people of Europe bowed in the dust, and paid him homage—­the
hero who by new victories had won ever-increasing
fame and fresh laurels, who had defeated Austria,
Prussia, and Russia, and who had engraven on the rolls
of French glory the mighty victories of Austerlitz,
Jena, and Eylau!

Josephine stood on the pinnacle of life; she saw the
princes of foreign states come to France as conquered,
as captives, and as allies, to bring to her husband
and to herself the homage of subjects; she saw devoted
courtiers and flatterers; pomp and splendor surrounded
her on every side.

Amid this glory she remained simple and modest—­she
never gave up her cheerful gentleness and mildness;
she never forgot the days which had been; she never
allowed herself to be exalted by the brilliancy of
the moment to an ambitious pride or to a lofty self-conceit.
The friends of the widow Josephine de Beauharnais always
found in the empress Josephine a thankful, obliging
friend, ever ready to appeal to her husband, and intercede
with him in their behalf. To the royalists, when
weary of their long exile, though poor and helpless
still loyal to the royal family—­when they
returned to France with bleeding feet and wounded hearts,
to implore from the Emperor of the French the privilege
of dying in their native country—­to them
all Josephine was a counsellor, a helper, a compassionate
protectress. With deep interest she inquired from
them how it fared with the Count de Lille, whom her
heart yet named as the King of France, though her
lips dared not utter it. All the assistance she
gave to the royalists, and the protection she afforded
them, oftentimes despite Napoleon’s anger, all
the loyalty, the generosity, and self-denial she manifested,
were the quiet sacrifice which she offered to God
for her own happiness, and with which she sought to
propitiate the revengeful spirit of the old monarchy,
loitering perchance in the Tuileries, where she now,
in the place of the wife of the Count de Lille, was
enthroned as sovereign.

Josephine’s heart was unwearied and inexhaustible
in well-doing and in liberality; if Napoleon was truly
the emperor and the father of the army and of the
soldiers, Josephine was equally the empress and the
mother of the poor and unfortunate.

But she was also, in the true sense of the word, the
empress of the happy. No one understood so well
as she did how to be the leader at festivals, to preside
at a joyous company, to give new attractions by her
gracious womanly sweetness and amiableness, or to receive
homage with such beaming eyes, and to make others happy
while she herself seemed to be made happy by them.